Malachi stirred the fire and hung a can over it to boil the coffee in. “How’d you and your brother come to be on opposite sides of this thing?”

“We just did,” Ben said, staring at the can.

Toby came up to the fire and squatted down in front of it, “You and your brother fight over some girl?”

“We didn’t fight,” Ben reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, “He just one day signed up, and I knew I had to, too, and there we was, enemies.’

“Me, I was drafted,” Toby said, “I bet there was a girl in it somewheres, you signing up thataway.”

“You keep on like that, you might get yourself shot,” Malachi said mildly, “setting yourself up for a target that way.”

I rewound the tape and waited. The call-completed button came on. I picked up the phone and gave the editor the remote code so she could receive the recorded message without redialing and waited again while she set up a recorder on her end.

“We’re all set here,” she said.

“Call me again if it doesn’t work,” I said, and hung up.

It was two-thirty. The snow looked like it had let up a little. Richard should be able to make it to his staff meeting. If he wasn’t sitting by the phone making sure I didn’t talk to Annie.

I picked up Randall’s Lincoln the President. Maybe he knew where Willie was buried. If he knew, he wasn’t telling, but he did say what Willie had died from. It was something called bilious fever, and God only knew what that was. Typhoid probably, though that was already a disease with a name in 1862, and a lot was made of his having caught a cold from riding his pony in bad weather, so it might have been a simple case of pneumonia.

Finding out what people died of a hundred years ago is almost impossible. Letters written by the grief-stricken relatives say that the daughter or son died of “milk fever” or “brain fever” or frequently just “a fever,” and even that is something. Sometimes the patient simply died, “having progressed weaker and more sickly through the winter till we held out little hope.”

Doctors’ accounts are no better. They diagnose agues and heavy colds and “diffusion of the heart.” Robert E. Lee, who had almost certainly suffered from angina throughout the war and died of a heart attack, was variously diagnosed as suffering from rheumatic excitement, venous congestion, and sciatica. The modern diagnosis had been pieced together only because somebody thought to write down the symptoms. Otherwise, nobody would have the slightest idea what he died of.

At any rate, Willie Lincoln “took cold” and died of pneumonia or typhoid or possibly malaria—whatever it was was probably contagious, because his brother Tad was sick, too—or something else altogether, lay in state in the Green Room, and then was moved to the East Room for the funeral

The funeral was well documented, though I had to put down Randall and rummage through the mess in Broun’s study to find the details. The government buildings were closed on the day of the funeral, which irritated Attorney General Bates, who commented that Willie had been “too much idolized by his parents.” Lincoln, his son Robert, and members of the Cabinet attended, and Mrs. Lincoln didn’t. The Reverend Dr. Gurley performed the service, Willie was bundled into a hearse, and then, like Tom Tita the cat, dropped out of sight.

Randall stopped cold after the funeral; everyone else I read quoted Sandburg, and Sandburg said blithely that Willie’s body had been sent back west for burial. It had, but not until 1865. I was sure of that. Lloyd Lewis had chronicled every detail of Lincoln’s funeral and the long train trip to Springfield, including Willie’s coffin, which lay in front of his father’s in the funeral car, so it wasn’t “sent back west” for over three years, and Sandburg, of all people, should have known that.

Sandburg had known Lewis back in the Chicago newspaper days. He had called him Friend Lewis when he wrote the introduction to Lewis’s Myths After Lincoln. I wondered if Sandburg had forgotten what Lewis wrote about Willie, or it something else had happened between them, something that made Lewis no longer a friend, something that meant they didn’t read each other’s books anymore. And was there a girl in it somewhere?

But even Lewis, who was a treasure trove of Lincolniana, didn’t say where Willie’s body had been for three long years. Was I supposed to assume that it lay in the East Room all that time, giving Lincoln bad dreams? Or had they buried it in the front lawn of the White House?

It was a quarter of four. I put the books back where maybe they would be next time I wanted them and called Annie.

She sounded sleepy, and that reassured me. She hadn’t been standing by the window in her wet coat looking out at the snow, listening to Richard tell her she was crazy. She had been asleep.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, but slowly, with a question in her voice.

“Good. I was worried about you. I was afraid you might have caught a chill out at Arlington.” Caught a chill. I sounded like a Civil War doctor.

“No,” she said, and this time she sounded a little more sure of herself. “Richard fixed me some hot tea and made me lie down. I guess I fell asleep.”

“Annie, does Richard have you taking anything? Any medication?”

“Richard?” she said, and that faint note of questioning was there in her voice again.

“Is Richard there?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and it was the only thing she’d sounded sure about so far. “He’s at the Institute.”

“Annie,” I said, and felt like I was shouting to her from the bottom of a hill, “are you taking any medicine, any pills?”

“No,” she said through a yawn.

“When you first came to the Sleep Institute, did Richard prescribe anything for you? Any medicine?”

“Elavil,” she said, and I grabbed my notes on Willie and scribbled it in the margin. “But then he took me off of it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He just took me off of it.”

“When did he do that?—take you off the Elavil?”

It took her a long time to answer. “It was after the dreams got clearer.”

“How long after?”

“I don’t know.”

“And he didn’t put you on anything else?”

“No,” she said.

“Listen, Annie, if you have any more dreams or if you need anything, if you want me to take you somewhere, anything, I want you to call me. All right?”

“All right.”

“Annie, last night you said you thought you were dreaming somebody else’s dream. Are you sure it was a dream?”

There was another long wait before she answered, and I was afraid the question had upset her, but she simply said, “What?” as if she hadn’t heard the question.

“How do you know it’s a dream, Annie? Could it be something that really happened?”

“No, they’re dreams,” she said, and her words were blurred a little, as if she still weren’t awake.

“How do you know?”

“Because they feel like dreams. I can’t describe it. They …” She all of a sudden sounded more awake. “What message was I looking for? Was it the message I sent to Hill at Harper’s Ferry?”

“No,” I said. “On the twelfth of September Lee issued campaign orders for the drive into Maryland. One of them was lost. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but a Union soldier found the order and gave it to McClellan.”

“There couldn’t have been a hundred and ninety-one copies of it, though,” she said, as if she were trying to convince herself. “Lee didn’t have that many generals. There probably weren’t that many generals in the whole Civil War.”

I said, “You’ve had a rough day. I don’t want you to catch pneumonia. Go back to bed, and we’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

“If there weren’t a hundred and ninety-one copies, why did I dream that number?”

“It was Special Order 191. It was addressed to D. H. Hill, the man you saw on the gray horse in your dream. He claimed the message was never delivered.”